Nexus 7 Teardown

Teardown

Google announced the Nexus 7 at their I/O keynote on June 27, 2012. Five days later, we tore one down. Some are calling the Nexus 7 a 'Kindle Fire killer,' but can it stack up to the Fire's impressive 8 out of 10 repairability score? We just had to find out.

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When we first heard about the Nexus 7, we assumed it was the secret Pentagon program: "A controversial intelligence program…known as Nexus 7, previously undisclosed as a war-zone surveillance effort, it ties together everything from spy radars to fruit prices..."

Alas, this Nexus 7 is from the other intelligence agency: Google. Even though it's not a secret Pentagon initiative, it does feel pretty stealthy and versatile for $200.

The white back of our Nexus proves it was an I/O original. And what's that? It's running an iFixit app? That's right folks; as of today, you can natively view our repair manuals on your Android device. Download now!

The front case assembly has exactly what we always expect inside a tablet: a big battery.

The Nexus 7 has a 4326 mAh, 16 Wh battery that can last 9:49 hours. The Kindle Fire, by comparison, has a 4400 mAh, 16.28 Wh battery -- but only lasts 7:42 hours. Go figure.

For further comparison, this time falls right in between the batteries found in the 2012 iPad models, which have 9:52 hours for HSPA and 9:37 hours for LTE. Except that the iPad 3 units are slightly larger at 42.5 Wh / 11500 mAh.

Unlike the iPad batteries, this battery was actually quite easy to remove; there was only a small amount of adhesive around the metal frame.

We are eager to get to that motherboard, but it seems we have another goodie to pull off it first.

Seated on the top left of the motherboard is one of the two microphones.

One of the new features in Jelly Bean is improved voice recognition. Is it as good as Siri? Will it remind you to put the gazpacho on ice? We would tell you the answers to these questions, but the microphone probably doesn't do us much good in its current state.

Here we have the 7-inch, 1280x800 HD display, manufactured by Hydis and designated model HV070WX2.

As is becoming a trend, the LCD is fused to the Corning glass. We have not heard if this glass is Gorilla Glass or Gorilla Glass 2, and we have broken far too many displays recently to dig any further.

Sadly, this fusion makes the cost of repairing shattered glass much higher, as it will require replacing the whole display assembly—LCD included.

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Excellent write-up! You created a little bit of a buzz with your comment in step 2 that the Nexus 7 includes a usb to hdmi adapter. Could you possibly confirm that this cable is, in fact, included and functions? Every other write-up about the Nexus 7 makes no mention of this cable and actually states that there is no MHL capability.

Directly comparing thicknesses between this and the iPad and attributing it to the retaining system alone is probably one of the silliest things I've read on iFixit.

Maybe the result wouldn't help with your agenda so much, but surely an honest analysis would to consider the extra battery (iPad's battery being over 2.6x larger) and display thickness (iPad's display needing a much stronger backlight).

Please figure it out correctly and rewrite Step 4. As it stands it's about as honest as a politician, which I hope is not where you guys are going with this.

Silly perhaps in style... Apple often dismisses the lack of serviceability by claiming that certain assembly methods are necessary to provide the thinnest and lightest package at an feasible cost. Given the spirit of the ifixit’s “Repairability Score”, the rhetoric employed by the author seems perfectly valid to me. I read this section as a challenge to Apple to do better. But I suspect the truth about why Apple does packaging the way the do is as follows: 1. Make it harder for users and competitors to see what's really inside, 2. Make it harder and more expensive to repair the devices, which leads to reason 3. Maximize profits- A very small part of which is reducing manufacturing costs, the major capitalization of this approach comes from encouraging users to upgrade every few years and skip all that DIY fixit stuff. Non-user replaceable batteries are a sure fire way to guarantee the finite lifecycle of any given device.

Tell me, if iFixit will service my Nexus 7 for $50 TOTAL, then maybe we'll have something to their comments. That $50 includes TWO WAY SHIPPING, PARTS snd LABOR.

Face it - when my Nexus 7 breaks in a year, there'll be a new model. If it's going to cost me $100 in total to fix including shipping (both ways), parts and labor, I could probably just buy a NEW ONE for $100 more.

At $50 completely fixed, it's worth it. People who own old cars face the same problem everytime it needs service - will it cost more to fix than its worth?

As for Apple, it's $79 to extend the warranty to two years. At the end of two years, when it breaks, it's probably worth maybe $200 when it works, and unless iFixit can promise to fix it for under $100 all-in, it'll go in the recycle bin as uneconomical to fix.

Fixing stuff is a hobby - where you can write off skilled labour charges ($50/hr min) since your time is "free". Some people can make a living off it - getting broken gadgets for free, fixing them for minimal cost and selling the units, the profit of which is used to pay off the parts and earn a little on the side (because the broken gadget was obtained for free).

And yes, I use iFixit - not for stuff that's still under warranty or compatible devices can still be obtained, for the old stuff that's not only not made anymore, but no one will repair them that needs to keep working. So old PowerPC Macs, for example that are no longer supported but there's some piece of software that needs to run on them (e.g., 68k/PowerPC "MacOS Classic"). For Intels, well, the decision is a lot harder since there are new ones, the only reason to keep an old one going is something like Rosetta.

thanks for the teardown.... Does it look like there are any additional I/O that can be hacked and made to work ? For example..... Serial UART .... i2c ..... GPIO .... Ethernet ..... alternate video ???? Again thanks for the information you provide...

Is it possible to replace the 8GB? To pay $50 for the 16GB version seems to be a bit too much. If there is a way to put a 16/32/64/128 (OK, I stop dreaming at this point ;) ) chip into the 8Gig Nexus 7, this would be great :)

The last step shows the lcd/digitiser assembly still enclosed within the plastic frame. Has anyone tried to remove the lcd/digitiser from the frame? The only lcd/digi assemblies I have found for sale do not include the frame so the broken screen has to be removed and the new screen fitted to the old frame. Doesn't sound like fun!

The glass is definitely not Gorilla Glass, and it is uber thin... I bought a broken N7 to perform evil experiments on and took it all the way apart, it was easy to see why they bonded the glass to the digitizer to the LCD to the frame - they are all so thin that it wouldn't have survived, otherwise.

The broken unit I bought had a cracked screen, so there was nothing to lose by tearing it apart. To get it all out of the plastic frame I was chipping away paper-thin pieces of glass and glue, and at the end I was using q-tips dipped in boiling water to scrub away the remaining glue. It *might* be possible to use heat to soften the glue and remove the whole display in one piece, but it is highly likely that the heat would cause more problems than it solved. If you only want to save the frame and don't care about the other bits, this might not be a problem.

There are probably other solutions involving chemicals to dissolve the glue, but I have no experience doing so.

Hi, I don´t know if this is a great place to ask this, but thought I would give it a try.

I am on my third nexus 7 and still have the batteries from the first two.

[Quick warning...beware! the glass can break just by prying the case open! Be careful!]

Can anyone tell me exactly how I might go about adding one or two extra batteries to my nexus to increase capacity? As in, exactly how to wire it? I am not electrically savvy, but can follow instructions well. I can figure out how to attach the batteries externally once wired; am not in the least concerned about ugliness or thickness.

Thanks for any help! I travel by bike a lot and would love to beef it up for those days when I stop a while and can´t charge off my dynamo.

Could you guys please check if that micro-USB to HDMI work?, since no other reviews mention seeing this cable included in their box. Furthermore, I didn't see any MHL chip (like the Silicon Image 9244 MHL transmitter you guys show on the Galaxy Nexus teardown) on the motherboard, then I'm confused on how this cable would work. Thanks!

Also very curious about the HDMI adapter. Please let us know if it works when you plug it in. First time I've read about one, and it puts the Nexus 7 back on the map for me. I love the MHL feature on my Galaxy Nexus.

the four metal dots (often called "pogo pins", which are really the springy pins that interface with such dots) are not USB (more's the pity) but they are for a dock: for charging, and for attaching external speakers.

You can read 5V & GND off the outer pins (which made it seem like USB was a possibility), the inner two don't appear to do anything at first... but if you temporarily ground the right speaker channel, that tells the chip a dock is connected and it starts sending stereo output on the inner two pins.

Is the camera cable a standard cable? Can it be extended? I'm mounting my N7 in my car, and I was curious if I could move the camera (to use as a backup camera) and just run a cable back to the device. The cable would have to be ~10 ft long (small car, but routing).

How is your mod doing? I want to place an N7 in my car too but mount it into a double DIN frame (Google ISO 7736). I'm trying to figure out how to get a longer cable for the screen, any chance you have come across one?

Actually, nevermind, it appears to be the same chip as step 14 and also appears to be in the same location as the microphone. Thus, it appears it is the second microphone. I wish they would mark it as such...

Out of curiosity, the emtpy contacts farthest to the right wouldn't be the ones for the hdmi port on the display units at I/O would they? If so, wouldn't it be technically possible to add an HDMI port back in? or is there something more that I'm missing?

If it is possible, could anyone point me in the direction of an hdmi port I can test with?

Those pins are for (future) docks, and possibly other accessories. (Keyboard-in-a-case, perhaps.) Google hasn't said what they are yet, and I haven't checked them out enough to know for sure, but it looks like the outer pins are power and ground (which makes sense for docks that charge) so I wouldn't be surprised if they turn out to be USB.

The HDMI ports you speak of (on the Nexi from Google I/O) were on the bottom, the other side of the USB port from the headphone jack. In the pics you can see the space in the frame where it goes (under the speaker assembly). Those units had a different I/O cable assembly (Step 10, image 3) that went all the way across.

A few days ago some slides from ASUS were leaked. (The original post is down but posts are still up at slashgear.com and pocketables.com.) They show a leather case, a new charger, and a dock that uses the pogo pins on the side of the Nexus. The dock has a micro USB connector for charging/connectivity and a 3.5mm line out jack for external speakers or connecting to a stereo.

Given that it is quite easy to pull data through USB (I have a USB 7.1 surround-sound adapter), this makes me think the pogo pins really are just a USB port.

The articles also mention that there is no HDMI output because including it would have driven the manufacturing cost too high. The only way you are going to get HDMI out of a Nexus is if someone starts selling the equivalent of the full-width I/O Cable Assembly that was in the white Google I/O units (with the HDMI chip on it). The good news is that the yellow cables are identical, so the signal is present at that end, but nobody has released 3rd-party hardware that can use it.

Actually, at step 17 in the teardown, there is an unpopulated 24pin connector to the right of the ram chips which I am guessing is the interface for the HDMI/TFcard interface board on the original MeMo 370T device.

If the side 4 pins are in fact just a USB interface, it would need to be a host device in order to connect to an external audio dock. That means (if correct) we don't need to root to get a USB host interface. I'll have to probe the pins :-)

Does anybody know if it is possible to get a longer replacement for this cable? I'm looking into tearing down a Nexus 7 to place it into a double DIN frame (Google ISO 7736) to use it in my car as a head unit.

I love your site. And cost-wise, yes it would probably be cheaper to just buy a new unit to replace dead one. But I'm thinking this site is for people who want to repair or reuse or re-purpose the parts. Basically tinkerers. I have an old tablet that the warranty has expired and I want to do something with it besides going to a landfill.

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